Dirty Politics and Partisanship

Uh oh, Michael Gerson has discovered that politicians are being mean to each other, and he's condemnatory. Why, look how offended he is by:

• The smear campaign, attributed to Karl Rove, that a politician with a long history of charitable work for abused children is a pedophile.

• The push poll, suggesting that John McCain had an African-American daughter, benefiting Gerson's ex-boss, George W. Bush.

• Whisper campaigns of the sort attributed to Karl Rove, that political opponents are gay.

• The false attacks on John Kerry by "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," which again benefited Gerson's boss while inspiring a new word for sleazy campaign tactics.

• Attacks on President Obama as a "socialist".

• Circulating flyers in churches, calling John McCain the "fag candidate", and suggesting that voters who didn't want homosexuals in the administration should vote for Bush.

• Attacks on President Obama's religious faith, suggesting that he's a secret adherent of "black liberation theology".¹

• Attacks on President Obama as "palling around with terrorists".

• False suggestions that the Obama Administration is anti-Catholic. (Oops.)

• False suggestions that the President was born in Kenya and isn't a legitimate President.

• President Obama's suggestion that Mitt Romney's record at Bain does not qualify him for the White House.

Note, I'm omitting the various wacko smears and conspiracy theories used to attack Clinton, as Gerson wasn't writing during that period and is a creature of the Bush/Rove machine. But I don't expect I would have much more luck finding Gerson expressing moral outrage that Clinton's political opponents were suggesting that he was guilty not only of financial impropriety, no matter what the facts turned out to be, but of murder.

Seriously, it's very difficult to find examples of Gerson actually arguing against dirty campaign tactics. Part of that could be self-interest, as it would not have done his career any good for Gerson to tell his boss, and his boss's "brain", that their campaign tactics were deplorable. Or it could be that he simply doesn't notice or care what's going on in the southbound lane.

It's fair to note that for a guy who supposedly wants a return to more mannered political campaigns, Gerson has been happy to ally himself with the worst of the attack gods, and for that matter at times to join their chorus. "Obama's not a bigot - but he surrounds himself with (anti-white) bigots". "He's arrogant and patronizing", an "elitist", an intellectual lightweight.² But when it comes to disavowing sleazy tactics directed against the President or other Democratic politicians, Gerson's silence is deafening. Look what happens when he's put on the spot, and unable to avoid addressing the false suggestion that Obama is "secretly a Muslim",

I think that this is a reflection of polarization. It is a reflection of a conspiratorial tendency on the Internet, which is true on left and right, by the way.

You see, just like whispers that a candidate is a pedophile or has an illegitimate African American child, there's no way such rumors could be planned, orchestrated and advanced by politicians, their supporters and campaign staff. The best explanation is that it's the Internet's fault. Yeah, that's it. And both sides do it.

And so I you know, I think and it's not but is not historically unprecedented. If you look back, people accused Know-Nothings accused Abraham Lincoln of being a secret Catholic, OK? People accused Franklin Roosevelt of being a Jew, OK, because with policies that he pursued.

There is a long history in America of people using these kind of attacks. But it was disturbing then and it's disturbing now.

And these attacks are disturbing, but they're really no different from the attacks that have occurred throughout American political history. It's disturbing but when you look at the big picture, no biggie, you know?

Well, it puts the president in a different position. You know, to object to this makes it sound like being, you know, of this faith is somehow objectionable, which it isn't. So, it's he shouldn't, I don't think, change, you know, carry a big Bible around. That would be deeply cynical, and he's not going to do that. The good book says, you should pray in a closet. That's, I think, pretty good political advice.

Tongue-tied and twisted. What else can I find? The "Obama's not a patriot because he doesn't wear a flag pin" argument? Gerson tells us it's not that Obama isn't a patriot - he doesn't wear a flag pin because he's a condescending snob.

It is now possible to imagine Obama at a cocktail party with Kerry, Al Gore and Michael Dukakis, sharing a laugh about gun-toting, Bible-thumping, flag-pin-wearing, small-town Americans.

In other words, Gerson is more than happy to be part of the smear machine when it's advancing his own political goals and agenda.

Gerson, predictably, feigns offense at the "polarization" created by President Obama's criticisms of Bain, and then it's all claws and venom:

Whatever his intentions or provocations, Obama is now engaged in partisan polarization on an industrial scale. His campaign’s latest round of Bain charges is not politics as usual. It is the accusation of criminal impropriety — the filing of false government documents — without real evidence, as various fact-checking outfits have attested. Obama’s recent attack ad, “Firms,” reflects the sensibilities of a particularly nasty 13-year-old. It is difficult to imagine most Americans saying: “That’s just what American politics most needs — more juvenile viciousness.”

Well, the evidence of the filing of false government documents would be that Romney is claiming to have "retired" from Bain several years before he stopped reporting himself to the SEC as President, CEO and sole owner. Gerson also deliberately overstates his case, pulling in the most outrageous statement made by anybody associated with the Obama campaign and pretending it's representative.

If I ignore Gerson's over-the-top rhetoric, he does make a valid point. Just as with the suggestion that Bill Clinton was guilty of fraud and murder, it's pretty extreme to accuse somebody of criminal activity when you don't believe that the charge will be substantiated, let alone that the person will be prosecuted. Unlike Gerson, I'm more concerned about conspiracy theories that don't die, or that are advanced for weeks, months or years by a political campaign that knows them to be false, than I am with an off-hand comment by a low-level campaign staffer. But I guess if you approach the argument with any amount of perspective it becomes harder to bash the President in the name of comity.

These are not excesses; they are the essence of Obama’s current political strategy. He is attempting to destroy Romney before Romney can define himself, while using a series of issues — the mini-DREAM Act, voting rights and contraceptive controversies — to excite his base. The approach is not politically irrational. But it is premised on the avoidance of issues such as unemployment and the deficit. And it leaves little room for complaints about the brokenness of Washington.

Why, it's almost as if they looked at the tactics of political operatives like Karl Rove, or politicians like George W. Bush, and said, "If we define our opponent, even if unfairly, we can win an election we might otherwise lose". Is Gerson's fit of pique, then, that the Democrats have studied at the feet of the masters, such as his former boss? That as dubious as the tactics are, they're actually pulling this off in a cleaner, more honest manner than one would have seen from a G.W. Bush or Karl Rove? Because it's really difficult to believe that Gerson was blithely writing speeches for G.W. without ever noticing his boss's tactics.

But these tactics do have an effect on politics. The most partisan Democrats are encouraged and empowered. The most partisan Republicans gain an excuse for the next escalation. This is the nature of polarization: Both sides feel victimized, which becomes a justification to cross past limits and boundaries. Neither side feels responsible for the problem, while both contribute to it.

It's difficult to argue with that. By dragging politics into the sewer, politicians like George W. Bush, operatives like Karl Rove and enablers like Michael Gerson set us up for a continuation and escalation of the problem. Except for some reason, in this context, Gerson isn't stammering that this is not really any different than what we've seen throughout the history of the nation's political campaigns, or that we should blame the Internet.

Funny, this,

Obama and his political team have a history of viewing themselves as superior to Washington and the “Beltway mentality.” The president combines a feeling of superiority to politics with a determination to beat his opponents at their own grubby game. It allows him to view himself as a pure, transformative figure while employing the tactics of a Chicago pol.

Gerson opens with the arrogance smear he's been pushing for years. He then states that the President is using the tactics of his opponents - that is, Gerson is stating that the "grubby" tactics he deplores when used by Obama are the intellectual property of the Republican Party. And that means that Obama is "employing the tactics of a Chicago pol", never mind that he just told us that Obama is using the tactics of the Republican Party.

And that "Chicago pol" thing? That's a smear that Republicans have been directing at Obama since he arrived on the political scene, a favorite of the worst of the hacks. Perhaps Michael Gerson can point me to a time when he has pushed back against the smear before giving it his full embrace? Or am I more likely to find the opposite?

Does Gerson actually deplore dirty politics? Truly, even if I were to ignore his role in the Bush Presidency, and say, "It was just a job - perhaps he held his nose a lot and hated what he and his colleagues were doing," I would have a difficult time believing that Gerson is sincere. Because no man who gushes about Karl Rove,

Rove's main influence on the Republican Party has not been a series of tactical innovations but a series of strategic arguments. In this way, Rove is the opposite of a cynical political operator.

can credibly claim that he dislikes sleazy, dirty political campaigns. It seems much more reasonable to infer that what people like Gerson hate is when the other side appears to be gaining the upper hand.

Update: I guess I should note that David Brooks apparently got the same party memo as Gerson and is in full blown hack mode. Brooks intentionally misrepresents the Obama campaign as attacking capitalism, when he knows full well that the actual attack is on Romney's claim that his experience leading Bain qualifies him to be President.

If Romney stumbled through the primary campaign and right wing attacks on his "vulture capitalism", it doesn't speak highly of him that he still has not formulated a response to the criticism of his background as a qualification for the White House.
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1. Gerson did write a condescending column, asserting that Rev. Jeremiah Wright is an adherent of black liberation theology and suggest that if the President was not aware of that he must have been sleeping through the services he attended. He fastidiously avoided stating, "I don't think the President holds these beliefs."

2. Gerson writes,

But it is hard to avoid the feeling that Obama has gained the nomination without fully earning it. Unlike Clinton or Bush, his intellectual contributions have been slight. The wave he rides may take him far -- but he is not determining its direction.

Seriously?

The Tea Party Purity Test

As I see it, the context of Michael Gerson's lament on the Tea Party is that he represents the faction of the Republican Party that is taking the long view - that an embrace of the Tea Party is likely to bring long-term political pain even if it results in short-term gain. But if Michelle Malkin is his "Exhibit A" of "childish political thought", perhaps he should take ownership of and responsibility for his own past actions and opinions.

In Tea Party theory, inexperience is itself seen as a kind of qualification. People like O'Donnell are actually preferable to people like Rove, because they haven't been tainted by public trust or actual achievement. This is the attitude of the adolescent -- the belief that the world began on their thirteenth birthday. It is also a sign of childish political thought.

So let's flash back to 1999, when the nation at large was introduced to G.W. Bush, with that introduction engineered in no small part by Karl Rove. His inexperience was of no concern, we were assured, because he would surround himself by experts. He was a different breed of Republican - an outsider; a uniter, not a divider; a compassionate conservative; an advocate for immigration reform. Don't ask about his "lost years" - he had become a sober, Christian conservative, and that should be enough for anybody.

From what I've read, a lot of Tea Party members haven't been politically active during their lives. They may have voted, but they didn't spend a lot of time reading about or thinking about the issues. That, frankly, is far from a surprise. You can read the paper before work (or, at least, you could have back in the day of most Tea Party members), work all day, watch the TV news before bed and think you're informed, and that would likely set you above and beyond most Americans in terms of your effort. But let's face it - at the end of the day that's likely to leave you with only a superficial understanding of the issues. Hence partisans like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and, yes, Karl Rove are able to identify opportunities to sink their hooks and reel people in, the goal not being to illuminate but to create a following. Had Karl Rove created the Tea Party movement in his own image, Gerson would be praising his genius.

I find it interesting that Gerson blasts Michelle Malkin, for her criticism of Karl Rove, as part of the problem - she's "childish". Why not go after Rush Limbaugh for saying what amounts to the same thing. Why not go after the big dog? Oh, that's right - because for doing that even Karl Rove can be called to heel, and Gerson's no Karl Rove. Malkin's prominent enough to be recognized, but not so prominent that Gerson is likely to face blowback.

Gerson's first complaint about the Tea Party approach is that it sends the message,

The facts do not matter. Politics is war carried on by other means. Anyone who doesn't consistently take one side is a traitor.

Would any of that bother Gerson if the warfere weren't internecine? Michelle Malkin has been using the same tactics ever since she gained prominence. What about Ann Coulter and her eager use of the word "Treason"? The facts don't matter now? When did they matter under Bush?

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

What about Ari Fleischer's infamous warning¹ (his very late explanation taken for what it's worth)?

Gerson continues with his explanation of what makes the Tea Party's political thought "childish":

Some conservatives have adopted the Bolshevik approach to information and the media: Every personal feeling, every independent thought, every inconvenient fact, must be subordinated to the party line -- the Tea Party line.

This reminds me of something....

When I was a speechwriter for the Bush Administration, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a columnist for the Washington Post, I put away childish things.

Gerson's accusation is something of a hollow man - he doesn't name a conservative who fits his accusation, although by implication he's including Malkin. I doubt he can name a conservative commentator who truly fits that description, who has abandoned past opinions and principle and now subordinates his every opinion to the Tea Party. Were he to find such an individual he would do us all a very great favor, because we would finally know what the Tea Party stands for.

Gerson offers up a second criticism of "Tea Party purists", again without identifying a single such purist, as believing that "their ascendance makes other elements of the conservative movement unnecessary":

If Tea Party activists believe they can win in a political coalition so pure that it doesn't include strong, mainstream conservatives such as Karl Rove, they are delusional. And they are hurting their own cause.

Is this to be read with an eye toward history, with G.W. and Karl Rove deciding that they could rule the country based upon the support of 51% of the electorate, rejecting the qualms of the "paleocons", the "reality-based community", fiscal conservatives, foreign policy conservatives, and any other faction whose believes and agenda didn't match their own? If so, yes, he has a point - if you represent a minority of Americans you will not be able to sustain victory at the ballot box without expanding your base. If not, his complaint reduces to the question of whose elephant ox is being gored.

Gerson's third complaint is a magnification of his second,

Third, some conservatives seem to display special venom for those who are "compromised" by the experience of actually winning and governing. Rove, according to Malkin, is an "establishment Beltway strategist."

How much of the last few decades of political history, including campaigns involving Karl Rove, are we to ignore? Because in case Gerson missed it, everybody wants to be an outsider. One of G.W.'s remarkable feats in constructing his brush-cutting cowboy image was convincing the nation that he, grandson of a U.S. Senator, son of a former President, beneficiary of his family's vast wealth and generations of political connections, was a Washington outsider. When you work as hard as Rove has done to turn words like "insider" into slurs, you don't have much ground to stand on when your work is turned against you.

[Karl Rove's résumé] does not make him always right. But it means he has had responsibilities bigger than running a Web site. This is an advantage for a commentator, not a drawback.

I joked a while back that the most prominent people held up as possible Republican Presidential nominees - Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Mitt Romney - quit the jobs that supposedly qualify them for the White House. In their recent experience, the only thing they've been running is their mouths. I recognize that Gerson has no love for Sarah Palin, but what do his words say about the rest of his party?

But seriously, the number of prominent right-wing pundits whose most significant "real world" experience came from writing speeches for politicians is high. Can Gerson truly be surprised that many of them fail to 'put away' their 'childish things'?
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1. While I have some sympathy for the idea that Fleischer, in warning Americans to "watch what they say, watch what they do", meant something other than what he said, he had ample opportunity on the very same stage to correct himself and the Bush Administration could easily have issued a clarification. The fact that they did not suggests that, whatever Fleischer's intent, the Bush Administration was content to let the public perception of the remarks stand.

The Right-Wing Push for a V.A.T. ("Consumption Tax")

A significant number of 'conservative' columnists appear to favor a 'value added tax' - a national tax on goods and services - as desirable and perhaps even inevitable. Charles Krauthammer doesn't expressly endorse a V.A.T., but declares one "inevitable". The chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, R. Glenn Hubbard, opines in the Wall Street Journal, insists that entitlements be slashed and that we implement "significant, broad-based tax increases", but not on the rich who he believes already pay too much income tax:

To raise the revenue for the president's welfare-state ambitions, the tax increases must necessarily be broad-based, as, for example, with a broad-based consumption tax. A useful start would be to calculate—and present to the public each year—the broad-based consumption tax required to pay for higher spending.

Karl Rove is very excited about the idea. One of Hubbard's former colleagues from Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, Donald B. Marron , shares similar thoughts in a different forum, calling for budget cuts and suggesting that any tax increases hit the middle class, while arguing that income taxes "are usually worse for the economy than taxes on consumption".

We should note at this juncture that none of these people were giddily calling for Bush to turn on the V.A.T. spigot, let alone to back away from his slashing of taxes for the rich, even those who were officially advising him. To the extent that a V.A.T. is made necessary by tax cuts for the rich, no problem - the important part is that a Democrat pass the V.A.T. so that they can sneer that he's a "tax and spend liberal" even as he implements the regressive tax policy they favor.

David Brooks, as you might expect, is in the game. Linking to Mr. Hunt, Brooks argues:

Debt reduction has to be about renewal and prosperity, not pain and sacrifice.

That means deficit reduction has to be embedded in policies that produce growth. Michael Graetz of Columbia University has proposed replacing the current awful tax code with a value-added tax of 14 percent, cuts in the corporate tax rate, and a fair income tax with two simple brackets kicking in over $100,000. Many people have ideas to streamline the welfare state. The message has to be: we can afford to have a thick safety net, if it is more efficient.

That's right - tax cuts for corporations and the rich, with the difference made up for by a regressive tax that hits the poor and targets the middle class. Going back to Hunt,

A bottom line, he sees, would be a tax system that — even if it isn’t more progressive and more simplified than the current one — at least encourages economic growth and investment, and is easier to adjust for changing economic circumstances.

So there it is, explicit - it's better in the mind of Brooks and Hunt to make the tax system less progressive and even more complex, if the result fits with their assumptions of what will drive the economy. No offense, I'm sitting through yet another a recession, looking back on Reagan's trickle-down and G.W.'s slashing of taxes for the rich and wondering why we should yet again trust the assumptions of right-wing commentators that the cure-all for any economic woe is to move toward a regressive system of taxation.

Note, even in the wealthiest circles, not everybody agrees with that particular brand of selfishness:

"I'm in favor of higher taxes on people like me," declared Eric Schoenberg, who is sitting on an investment banking fortune. He complained about "my absurdly low tax rates."

"We're calling on other wealthy taxpayers to join us," said paper-mill heir Mike Lapham, "to send the message to Congress and President Obama that it's time to roll back the tax cuts on upper-income taxpayers."

"I would with pleasure sacrifice the income," agreed millionaire entrepreneur Jeffrey Hollender.

When Republicans were proposing the so-called "FairTax" to replace income taxes with a consumption tax, the flaws in the concept were patent. The new proposal appears to be to cut income taxes for the wealthy while implementing the V.A.T. - sort of a "worst of all worlds" solution. George H.W. Bush had it right when he said "No new taxes" (even if he meant "no tax increases"). Taxes tend to work like leaky faucets. It's really easy to turn them up, but really hard to turn them off. The uber-wealthy thought that they had lobbied their way out of estate taxes, but it turns out not to be so easy. Although exceptions occur, particularly where the wealthy and powerful are concerned, once a tax is implemented its natural tendency is to go up. If you've never done it before, for a "you've gotta be kidding me" moment check out that list of taxes on your phone bill. Even if you don't care that a V.A.T. is regressive, you should care about any new tax. Perhaps especially when it's a tax that the political right appears to love.

Lies, Lies and More Lies from Palin

It's a wonder she was supposedly worried about ethics investigations, given that she apparently has none. At least judging from this WSJ stenography of her lame excuses and fabrications for quitting:

"Attacks inside Alaska and largely invisible to the national media had paralyzed her administration," someone close to the governor told me.

Well, the Wall Street Journal qualifies as "national media" and John Fund, the author of this puff piece, was giving Palin's anonymous drones his undivided attention, so how about a "for instance"? I didn't think so....

This situation developed because Alaska's transparency laws allow anyone to file Freedom of Information Act requests. While normally useful, in the hands of political opponents FOIA requests can become a means to bog down a target in a bureaucratic quagmire, thanks to the need to comb through records and respond by a strict timetable. Similarly, ethics investigations are easily triggered and can drag on for months even if the initial complaint is flimsy. Since Ms. Palin returned to Alaska after the 2008 campaign, some 150 FOIA requests have been filed and her office has been targeted for investigation by everyone from the FBI to the Alaska legislature.

The author is conflating two entirely separate issues - FOIA and ethics investigations. Given Palin's run for Vice President, it's no small wonder that there were FOIA requests, and frankly 150 seems like a low number. Further, there would be no need for Palin to personally involve herself in any of those requests. But I guess there is a tie-in to Palin's ethics (or lack thereof) - she (or someone on her behalf) did involve herself in FOIA request in order to obstruct the release of information.

For ethics investigations, Palin should make a video of herself like GW's search of the oval office for WMD's. "Ethics? Not in the closet... not under the desk... nope, no ethics here." But there's another conflation going on. The FBI doesn't investigate "ethics violations", and doesn't initiate investigations based upon Alaska's "easily triggered" laws. It investigates federal crimes. Also, let's not forget that Palin herself built her career on challenging the corruption in Alaska's politics. What's sauce for the gander....

Oh, and let's not forget that Palin filed an ethics complaint against herself over Troopergate that cost the state $187,797 to investigate. That is well over half of the $296,000 the state has spent on all ethics investigations of her.

In the process, though, she accumulated $500,000 in legal fees in just the last nine months, and knew the bill would grow ever larger in the future.

How much of that has come out of her pocket? Any? I thought her legal defense fund was pulling in huge numbers.

Family considerations also played a role. Ms. Palin gave birth to a baby with Down's Syndrome in 2008, and also has a six-year old. Everyone in the family was weary of endless personal attacks, including mean-spirited suggestions on liberal blogs that all of her children should have been aborted and that she would run on a presidential platform promoting retardation.

Bad stenographer, bad editor. It's Down Syndrome.

It's not credible that Palin is withdrawing from politics due to the sudden realization that she has children. She had children when she entered politics. She had children when she ran for VP. Trig was born in April, 2008. She decided to run for VP in August, 2008. It's July, 2009. Give me a break.

As for the personal attacks, last time I saw Palin speaking out about them she was reveling in them, inflating them, claiming a (bad) joke about her adult daughter was about her young teen - a choice that inappropriately put her 14-year-old at the center of things - and all but accusing David Letterman of being a pedophile. Her supporters were rallying to her, declaring what meanies her critics are. So that doesn't ring true, either.

As for "mean-spirited suggestions on liberal blogs", the easiest thing to do if you find a blog where people say things you don't want to read is... not to read them. But that's giving the allegation more credibility than it deserves. A simple question: Which blogs? How about a "for instance"? I didn't think so....

Karl Rove acknowledges the unusual battering Ms. Palin has endured in recent months, but told Fox News that GOP leaders are still puzzled by her decision. "If she wanted to escape the ethics investigations and save the taxpayers money, she's now done that," he said. Unfortunately, he added, her decision "sent a signal that if you do this kind of thing to a sitting governor like her, you can drive her out of office."

Unusual how? Unusual in the sense that it wasn't orchestrated by Rove? If I were to compare the treatment of Palin to the treatment of the Clintons, or the treatment of her children to the treatment of Chelsea Clinton, it actually seems like Palin got off easy. If I compare her to the guy Rove allegedly accused of pedophilia, or the smear campaign Rove allegedly ran against McCain in 2004, again....

But Palin friends say such commentary misses the real point.... The real issue that should be asked is why a mean-spirited system has to treat people who run like that, instead of why someone may choose not to go through it."

The author of this piece had Karl Rove on the phone, and didn't ask that question? Go figure. He could also have asked Palin, herself.

In law, there's a practice disdained by experienced lawyers, that particularly on appeal can undermine you with a judge. The "kitchen sink" / "throw spaghetti at the wall" approach. When you're trying to make a compelling case, it's usually counter-productive to throw everything at the judge to see if something sticks. The strong arguments get lost among the weak.

But sometimes you only have weak arguments. Assuming you made the mistake of accepting a weak case and don't want to cut your losses, you then must try to pick the strongest of the weak bunch, make a desperate "spaghetti throw", or recognize that your case may be better made in the future when more facts or evidence are available. If this truly is the best Palin's camp can come up with, she should resist the temptation to have WSJ stenographers prattle about how unfair the world is. She should decide for herself why she quit, make that her story, and stick with it. I'm not expecting the truth, but any plausible reason would be better than a spaghetti throw.

Rove's Dissembling on Health Care

Karl rove shares this anecdote:

It was a sobering breakfast with one of the smartest Republicans on Capitol Hill. We can fix a lot of bad stuff President Barack Obama might do, he told me. But if Mr. Obama signs into law a "public option," government-run insurance program as part of health-care reform we won't be able to undo the damage.

Anonymous? I don't think Rove's making the story up, nor do I think he's such a pariah that the politician at issue doesn't want people to know he still breaks bread with Rove. So the most likely reasons for the anonymity are:

• The politician at issue doesn't want to have to defend his comments on the merits; or

• The politician at issue was speaking of "bad stuff" in a very different way than Rove suggests. That is, he's using the term to mean the implementation of policies, no matter how sound, that make it more difficult for the Republican Party to regain power.

If Rove were an honest man, beyond naming his breakfast guest he would admit the following: It would be easy to kill a public plan that people found unsatisfactory. What scares him is not that it will work or be ineffective, but that it will be better, cheaper and more efficient than private health insurance plans and decades of fear mongering about "socialized medicine" will have been for naught. (Not to mention, $millions in health insurance industry lobbying dollars would disappear from Republican coffers.)

I'd go the Republican member of Congress one further: If Democrats enact a public-option health-insurance program, America is on the way to becoming a European-style welfare state.

"European-style welfare state"? I guess that's the new term for "socialist", that particular epithet having lost its traction. Perhaps Mr. Rove will elucidate: Which European countries are not "welfare states"? And which nations in the world are clamoring to imitate the U.S. model? (I might quip, why does Rove have so little faith in America that he believes we can't create a national health care plan as good as those people in countries like France and Canada have absolutely no interest trade for a U.S.-style scheme of insurance.)

Rove offers a number of flimsy arguments against a public option. For example he claims that "Advocates say a government-run insurance program is needed to provide competition for private health insurance. But 1,300 companies sell health insurance plans. That's competition enough." Except as he fully knows, the market for health insurance is not a normal market. The principal buyers are employers who, in the absence of a CBA mandating a minimum level of benefits, seek to minimize their expenditures. They look for the cheapest plan they can successfully foist on their employees. Most employees don't have a choice of plans, or at best get to choose from a handful of plans within their employer's price bracket. If they're not employed, the market's a near failure - individual plans tend to offer a glorious mix of extremely high cost, high deductibles, and poor coverage.

Rove speaks of savings brought on by competition in the Medicare drug plan, using high projected costs to spin the illusion that competition has reduced cost to the government, but neglects to mention that the Republicans deliberately excluded Medicare from using its market position to negotiate discounted drug prices - that is, they knew full well that without their legislative hamstringing, Medicare would have outcompeted the private plans. You don't believe me? Ask him to put his money where his mouth is, remove all restrictions on the government's ability to negotiate drug discounts, and prove that private plans are cheaper. He'll no doubt stammer out an excuse about how it's not fair for a government plan to be able to negotiate for discounts even though private plans are free to do so, but it will be a smokescreen.

Rove all but admits his deceit, arguing, "government-run health insurance would crater the private insurance market, forcing most Americans onto the government plan." His reasoning is that employers would see the government plan as, you guessed it, the cheapest option. And despite his regurgitation of the standard parade of horribles, about how doctors and hospitals won't get adequate payment for services (yet apparently would still participate), government bureaucrats will choose your doctor, and the cost will be higher than that of private plans (ostensibly because any government plan would be subsidized, but he's barely trying for internal consistency), people will voluntarily sign up with the government plan. Uh, yeah....

Health care desperately needs far-reaching reforms that put patients and their doctors in charge, bring the benefits of competition and market forces to bear, and ensure access to affordable and portable health care for every American. Republicans have plans to achieve this, and they must make their case for reform in every available forum.

Great, Karl. How about sharing those plans right here and right now? Or naming a single country where a public plan, in competition with private plans, has led to the outcome you describe? Oh, out of space? Why does that always seem to happen right when the discussion might become substantive.

As Rove obviously understands, its easier to run for election while claiming to have a "secret plan" than it is to do so while admitting that you don't actually have an answer. And, of course, that a lie told often enough becomes the truth.

Karl Rove Has a Point

If this is true, you gotta give the devil his due:

"We know from her record on the 2nd Court of Appeals that she's not a particularly effective colleague. I first got wind of this when Sam Alito, who was her colleague on the court while we were reviewing his record, it - you know, people who were familiar with the workings of the court said that she was combative, opinionated, argumentative, and as a result, was not able to sort of help create a consensus opinion on important issues.

* * *

"Well - in conference, excuse me - what she would do is she would mark [opinions] up like she was your English school teacher and - with your typos and misspellings and other words that she wanted to have changed, and send them back to her colleagues - not exactly the best way to ingratiate yourself with your colleagues."

I mean, if Sotomayor truly didn't have enough to do over in the Third Circuit, and spent her time intercepting draft opinions from the Second Circuit to correct their spelling and grammar mistakes, and was so involved in their decision-making that they described her as a "colleague", you have to wonder about her.

On the other hand, I suppose it's possible that Rove is spinning a Republican talking point, far less concerned with facts than with perpetuating a smear through the media. But really, what are the odds that Karl Rove, of all people, would resort to cheap, dishonest smear tactics.

Oh, Spare Me....

Richard Cohen is amazed that G.W. Bush is an avid reader. And he knows, for a fact that Bush is an avid reader because... Karl Rove told him. Seriously.

Still, the fact remains that Bush is a prodigious, industrial reader, and this does not conform at all to his critics' idea of who he is. They would prefer seeing him as a dolt, since that, as opposed to policy or ideological differences, is a briefer, more bloggish explanation of what went wrong. Still, in fairness to these critics (see Rove above), Bush himself has encouraged this approach. Aw shucks is an infuriating defense of a policy.

And Cohen knows this because he read what Bush critics have to say, or because that's what Karl Rove told him about Bush's critics?

Birds of a Feather

Andrew Sullivan suggests that fellow know-it-all Christopher Hitchens may be wrong in relation to Karl Rove being a non-believer.

Who knows Rove's religion best, do you think? Fred [Barnes] or Hitch?

Dare I say, Karl Rove knows Rove's religion best. Rove has ready access to the world's media, and is more than able to speak for himself.

"Trust Me"

What a generous offer....

The White House says it will make Karl Rove and former counsel Harriet Miers available to testify — but not under oath — about the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys in 2006.

How could anybody look that gift horse in the mouth....

The "Myth" Of Karl Rove

I've read a number of comments where people suggest that the outcome of the midterm election reveals that Karl Rove's plans and abilities were overrated. It's possible to take another interpretation - that his tactics were (and remain) extremely effective, but that he pushed too hard. If history is a guide, we can expect even more Rovian tactics in future elections, and anybody who wishes to win (locally or nationally) would be wise not to underestimate their effectiveness. Had the Republican Party not become overconfident after 9/11, and taken a more cautious approach to pushing the country to the right, I believe that they would still control the Senate, and quite possibly the House.

I do suspect that people tended to give Karl Rove too much credit for past election victories, but I think it's unquestionable that many are attributing to him too much fault for this loss.

So His Silence Means... Guilt?

President Bush is famously tight-lipped about the criminal acts of his underlings. Even when it seems obvious that he knows or could easily determine the culprit's identity, has promised to take strong action against the culprit, and an inictment has been issued, he insists that we must reserve judgment.

Except, as it seems, where he believes the suspect is innocent.

Compare:

On Wednesday, Bush was asked on Fox News Channel whether he believed DeLay was innocent, and he replied, "Yes, I do."

Spokesman Scott McClellan said Thursday that Bush was exercising his "presidential prerogative" in commenting on the case.

Contrast:

Yesterday, Wilson delivered a speech in which he said Rove should lose his job regardless of whether he knowingly used Plame's name or revealed her CIA connection. "This is a firing offense," he said.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan rejected that idea and said Rove was at work, engaged in meetings and enjoying Bush's full confidence. McClellan said the White House will not comment on the leak because the investigation is ongoing and it does not want to prejudice the Libby case.

Oh, no... They certainly wouldn't want to do that....